Watch this video on gelliottmorris.com.
On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, G. Elliott Morris and David Nir dig into why the polls underestimated Democrats in the 2026 midterms. The miss was real but smaller than many people are claiming (with some incorrectly saying it was the “worst general election performance ever”).
The evidence suggests the error was mostly caused mostly by likely voter screens that got turnout wrong. We also cover a (flawed) Republican thesis about polling misses; the surge of new and infrequent voters; and why weighting by past vote still deserves a defense.
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Timestamps for major topics
00:00 Welcome + two theories of the polling miss
04:42 How big was the miss, really?
09:57 Issues: democracy as a bigger voting issue than most press coverage indicated
14:43 The Ruffini thesis
17:03 Theory 1: Non-response bias (voters who showed up were more Democratic within demographic group)
22:30 Theory 2: Bad likely voter models
38:15 New and infrequent voters broke hard for Democrats
42:36 In defense of weighting by past vote
. . .
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly livestream on Substack. We’ll be back next week!
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